Hasslein Blog

Friday, August 18, 2017

R.I.P.: Hasslein Books Co-founder Paul C. Giachetti

It is with the
heaviest of hearts that I announce that one of my very best friends—basically,
my brother—passed away two weeks ago today. Paul Giachetti was more than just my friend, however. He was also my business
partner at Hasslein Books.I've known Paul for almost 20 years, and have been close with him since very soon after meeting him. He
was one of the kindest, most generous, most considerate people I've ever been
fortunate enough to meet, and everyone who knew him felt
the exact same way.

Paul and many of his closest friends at one of his New Year's Eve parties—a Paul Giachetti tradition...

...and at a more formal affair.

Paul was the
author of two extremely well-received books, Total Immersion: The Comprehensive Unauthorized Red Dwarf Encyclopedia Volumes I and II, and he was also a
20-plus-year veteran of business-to-business magazines as an art director and
graphic designer. Publishing was his passion, along with video games, Star Trek, Star Wars, Stargate, Rick and Morty, South Park, Doctor Who, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Babylon 5, The Fifth Element (he lovedMila Jovovich), cosplaying, and the British science-fiction comedy Red Dwarf.But more than that, he was passionate about the people in his life. He adored his niece, his nephew, his brother, his sister-in-law, his
parents, all of his friends, and the online Red Dwarf fan community, and that sentiment was returned tenfold. He
was an uncle to the children of all his close friends, and he was someone you
could always count on, no matter the circumstance.

When it comes to Red Dwarf, Paul wrote the book(s)—literally.

Paul's death
was sudden and tragic, and those of us who knew him well are all heartsick at
his passing. There are only a handful of people in my life whom I've ever
considered among my "best friends"—it's a term I don't use
lightly—but he was high on that list. He was also the perfect business partner. During the five years he and I worked together at a B2B magazine as managing editor and art director, and during the decade during which he and I ran Hasslein, we've never had even a SINGLE argument or disagreement about what direction to take.That's not even hyperbole; we agreed on everything and took great joy in building this company up from a small, independent publisher to... well, to the small, independent publisher that it still is. I am privileged to have worked with several fantastic collaborators during my quarter-century as a published writer and editor, but Paul was in a class all by himself.

I can't imagine manning another convention booth without my friend and cohort.

My heart goes
out to Paul's brother Jason, his sister-in-law Amy, his niece Mila, his nephew Luca, and his
parents, John and Jennifer, who are dealing with something no one should ever
have to deal with. Having lost my father (Vincent Handley), a brother (Eric Tyner), and other members of my
family, I know what they're going through, and it breaks my heart. I can only
hope they find consolation in knowing that all of his closest friends are
shattered by the passing of someone who truly deserved the title of "friend,"
in the sense that what we really mean when we say it is "family."

It's almost impossible to find a photo of Paul when he wasn't smiling.

On the other hand...

Rest in peace,
my brother. The words "You will be missed" are so inadequate to the
task of summing up how we all feel about you. Now that you have begun your journey through time and relative dimensions in space, always remember to bring your towel and your multipass as you pass beyond the Rim, and never take any smeg from anyone.

NEW YORK, June 23,
2016—Since her
debut in Marvel's Conan the Barbarian
during the early years of the Bronze Age of Comics, Red Sonja has become the
undisputed queen of sword and sorcery. She has hacked and slashed her way
through more than 300 comic books to date—a number that continues to grow in
the pages of Dynamite Entertainment's series.Savage and beautiful, altruistic
and deadly, Sonja, the flame-haired "She-Devil with a Sword," is a
war-goddess in the tradition of Athena or the Valkyries—but though divinely blessed
with supreme battlefield prowess, she is a flesh-and-blood woman. It is this
dichotomy that makes Sonja the most redoubtable female of the Hyborian world.

In Hasslein Books' latest release, Drawn Swords: An Unauthorized Exploration of Red Sonja and the Artists Who Brought Her to Life, author Matthew Stephen Sunrich explores the character's
adventures and how they relate to other comics, as well as novels, television
programs, and films. Drawn Swords features
a special foreword by Red Sonja:
Vulture's Circle author Nancy A. Collins, a noted horror fiction writer
widely praised for her Sonja Blue vampire
novels, as well as her comic book work on Swamp
Thing, Vampirella, and other
titles.

Drawn Swords: An Unauthorized Exploration
of Red Sonja and the Artists Who Brought Her to Life is now available to
order from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, and CreateSpace. Click here for more information
about this book, and here to download an excerpt.

Media requests: To obtain a review
copy of Drawn Swords, or to arrange
for an interview with author Matthew Stephen Sunrich, please email
info@hassleinbooks.com.

About Hasslein BooksHasslein Books is a New York-based independent
publisher of reference guides by geeks, for geeks. In addition to Drawn Swords, the company's line-up of
unauthorized genre-based books includes titles about the Watchmen, Planet of the Apes,
Back to the Future, Red Dwarf, and Doctor Who franchises, with future volumes slated to feature G.I. Joe, James Bond, and more. To stay
informed regarding the company's projects, follow Hasslein Books on Facebook and Twitter, and at
the Hasslein Blog.

Monday, June 5, 2017

Comic Books: Writing or Art?

By Matthew Stephen Sunrich

Since at least the 1960s, there has been a lot of debate
about which aspect of comic books is more important, writing or art. One could
reasonably argue that both are indispensable, as the medium represents a
marriage of the two, wherein neither is more important than the other, but it
appears that many fans fall into one camp or the other.

When comics were a new thing during the 1940s, the quality
of art varied wildly. Much of it wasn’t very good because it didn’t have to be.
Many publishers would hire anyone who could get the job done in a hurry. Comics
were considered kids’ stuff, and kids, after all, are hardly aesthetes. By the
1950s, however, the standards began to change. In the pages of Tales from the Crypt and Crime SuspenStories, for example,
readers were treated to the sensational work of such luminaries as Graham
Ingels, Jack Kamen, Johnny Craig, and Jack Davis, whose art made fans’ blood
run cold with their macabre renderings.

Sunday, May 7, 2017

To Boldly Collect What Others Have Published Before

By Rich Handley

When it comes to collecting Star Trek comics, every fan does things according to his or her own unique preferences. Some set out to own every individual issue, while others forego buying their comics monthly and instead purchase trade paperback and/or hardcover editions repackaging entire storylines or series. Some buy only one copy of each issue that comes out, while others attempt to track down every single variant cover ever produced, which can be incredibly expensive. Still others have fully made the transition to reading their comics digitally.

Some focus only on specific characters (James T. Kirk's crew, for example), writers (anything by Peter David, Howard Weinstein, or Michael Jan Friedman), artists (anything with a Jerome Moore cover), publishers (all IDW or DC Comics tales), or eras (just stories set in the 24th century). And some who have money to burn set their sights on finding everything remotely related to Star Trek comics, even if it's something they already own but in a different format.

Marvel's Star Trek: Untold Voyages issue #1, written by Glenn Greenberg, with art by Michael Collins and Keith Williams, is the reason Star Trek comics are worth collecting. If you haven't read this five-issue miniseries, you owe it to yourself to rectify that oversight immediately.

My personal collection contains every licensed Star Trek comic book published to date by Gold Key/Western, Power Records, Marvel, DC, Malibu Comics, Marvel/Paramount Comics, WildStorm Comics, Tokypop, IDW, and Wired magazine, along with unauthorized issues from Antarctic Press, Indonesian publisher Penerbit Cypress, Amazing Stories, and "Inner Light" writer Morgan Gendel. I also have all of the British strips published in Joe 90: Top Secret, TV21 & Joe 90, and Valiant and TV21, and the U.S. strips created by the Los Angeles Times Syndicate, as well as several unusual and often-overlooked strips aimed at young children that were packaged with toys offed by Kenner, McDonald's, and Larami. And in all cases, I have the original, individual comics or strips.

Ever since I began collecting Trek comics in 1984 (with issue #9 of DC's first Star Trek series, which so hooked me that I immediately began tracking down everything that preceded it), my goal has been simple: to own and read every Star Trek story ever told in comic book or comic strip form—and preferably in its original format.

Collecting all of the many reprints has not been something I've sought to do, however, as it would be not only prohibitively expensive but also redundant. If I already own every issue, why would I also need those same issues reprinted in a dozen different formats? The stories and artwork remain the same from one iteration to the next, after all, other than some clean-up work on the coloring. Still, there are always exceptions to any rule, and in my case, the exceptions are whatever reprint editions happen to strike my fancy or are particularly appealing from an aesthetics standpoint. These include...

Saturday, April 29, 2017

Trumping the Future

By Rich Handley

Today,
my son and I watched a story about a corrupt, sexist, bullying billionaire who
rose up in power without having earned his own wealth, to become a dangerous,
womanizing douchebag who used his money to control and manipulate. He married
three women, all of them beautiful, the third of whom, though very clearly unhappy
with her lot in life, remained subservient to him out of fear because her financial
stability and that of her children fully depended on it. He looked ridiculous,
with reddish-grey, straw-like hair combed over very stupidly; he treated women
like property to molest; he used a propaganda machine and lots of spectacle to
keep his followers ignorant of his true motives by pandering to their
baser natures; he exhibited a small vocabulary and tended to misuse phrases when
he spoke, indicative of a low IQ and poor education; and he erected an overly
tall building and lived in its elaborate penthouse, very clearly to compensate
for having an inadequate manhood. A megalomaniacal land mogul and political
figure, he had strong ties to organized crime, gambling and vice. He was
ruthless to his enemies, without actually accomplishing anything or working an
honest day in his life. He hated scientists and youths who questioned
authority, and the only thing that ever mattered to him was his own gratification—which
he walked all over others to achieve. In short, he was a fascist, dishonest,
corrupt piece of shit who needed to be taken down before he could do any further
damage to the population over whom he held domain.

Then, after we finished watching Back to the Future
Part II, we watched a news report about Donald Trump.

Thursday, April 20, 2017

The British Star Trek Newspaper Strips—Fully Reprinted At Last

By Rich Handley

There's
satisfying feedback, and then there's satisfying feedback.

As
some of you know, I've been working with IDW for the past few years to reprint
all of the old Star Trek comic strips from 1969 to 1973 and 1979 to 1983. One of the talented artists on
those strips was a man named Mike Noble. A mutual
friend, Lee Sullivan, helped me arrange
for Mike to receive copies of these books, which reprint his 40-plus-year-old
work.

An example of Mike Noble's wonderful artwork from the 13th U.K. storyline, "Mutiny on the Dorado."

Lee told me today that Mike is very happy with how the books came out—and specifically with the introductory materials I wrote. That alone justifies all the work that went into writing them. I'm
a great fan of Mike Noble's beautiful artwork, so knowing that he thinks we did
justice to his legacy is something I'm very proud of.As it happens, I received
a PDF of the fifth and final volume (two volumes reprint the U.S. strips, three for the U.K. strips) just last night, to review prior to
printing, and it looks fantastic. The third British volume collects strips that, back
in the 1960s, were printed in such a way that they came out a bit muddy and
dulled, so I was worried that this volume might not look as impressive as the
others. Silly me. I needn't have worried, as IDW's Library of American Comics
(LOAC) imprint cleaned them up extremely well, just as they did for the previous volumes—they look far better than I
could have hoped.

The
book is now off to the proofreader and then the printer, which means my role in
this five-year project has come to a close—which both excites and saddens me,
as this was something I've actually been trying to make happen for about 15
years or so. My thanks to IDW's Chris Ryall for giving me the greenlight back
in 2012, and to LOAC's Dean Mullaney for doing such an amazing job of restoring
these strips. The work Dean and I have done on these books has been a truly enjoyable collaboration that has culminated in friendship, and I'm going to
miss it (though not for long, as I'm now working with Dean on another
project—reprinting the old Star Wars comic strips from the L.A. Times Syndicate).

For
many years, I'd never met a single Star Trek fan besides me who owned a complete run
of these old newspaper and magazine strips. Now, thanks to the efforts of Chris and Dean,
thousands of fans have the strips on their shelves, and I can actually discuss them with other comics enthusiasts, which is much better than being the only guy on the block. It was my honor to be involved in making it
so.

Finally, the upcoming third volume reprints storylines #31-37 (Valiant issues #43-118), the TV21 1972 and 1973 annuals, the Mighty TV Comic 1978 and 1979 annuals, the 1972 Valiant Summer Special, a Radio Times issue, and additional strips from Larami's Star Trek Space Viewer, the Kenner/Chad Valley Give-a-Show Projector, and more, with a Star Trek cover gallery and more supplementary materials from that Handley fellow.

Eaglamoss will soon reprint a portion of the UK strips as part of its Star Trek Graphic Novel Collection, and I've been privileged to be a part of that project as well (as discussed here). Eaglemoss has been doing a phenomenal job of repackaging these and many other Star Trek comics from throughout the past five decades, and I'm thrilled to see the U.K. strips being included in that set of hardcover books. Since Eaglemoss is a British publisher, it's only fitting that the strips would end up back in print in the land that first spawned them.

Eaglemoss is reprinting part of the U.K. strips from IDW's U.S. reprints for Eaglemoss's U.K. audience. It's Trekception at its finest.

After remaining Star Trek's most obscure comics series for decades, the British strips are finally getting their time in the spotlight. It's much deserved, and IDW, The Library of American Comics, and Eaglemoss have done fans a great service in making them widely available at last.

Sunday, April 9, 2017

Vampirella #38

By Matthew Stephen Sunrich

By
the time I started collecting comics, Vampirella had been absent from
the racks for about six years.

The
original series ended with issue #112 in 1983; its companion magazines Creepy
and Eerie held on for another couple years or so before James
Warren, owing to health problems and other concerns, decided to close up shop.
The property was subsequently acquired by Harris, which handled a variety of
periodicals such as Guitar World, when it was auctioned off, but the
company didn't begin publishing new Vampirella material until 1991.

Fan
reaction to the stories, which were published in color comics rather than
black-and-white magazines, was mixed, but the books sold fairly well. Drakulon's
favorite daughter reached the peak of her popularity in the late 1990s when "bad
girl" comics, oddly, became a thing, and many prominent writers, including
Alan Moore and Kurt Busiek, contributed to her adventures. Harris held onto her
until 2010, when it surrendered the lovely vampiress to Dynamite.

Admittedly,
I had never found the character particularly worth looking into. For one thing,
unlike the throngs of quasi-pretentious geeks/community-theater actors who
played White Wolf's Vampire: The Masquerade roleplaying game around that
time, I had never thought much of undead blood-suckers. In Bernie Wrightson:
A Look Back, I found that the famed horror artist's opinion mirrored my
own. "They tend to be snotty," he remarked, "and like being
vampires." Other than Marvel's Morbius (who became a vampire as a result
of a failed experiment), it didn't seem that vampires were ever looking for a
cure. As Wrightson expressed, they didn't appear to have a problem with their
condition, and they even possessed a certain "coolness" factor that
reminded me of the popular crowd in high school. Remember that Ray-Ban
commercial where the vampires are immune to sunlight because they're wearing
designer shades? Ugh. (Trivia: The concept of vampires' being killed by the sun
originated in F. R. Murnau's 1922 film Nosferatu, not in Dracula,
the novel of which it was an unauthorized adaptation. While Dracula was
weakened by daylight, it was not fatal to him.)

I
knew virtually nothing about Vampirella; my opinion was based on the images I
had seen in various magazines such as Wizard and Previews, which,
like a lot of the art in 1990s horror comics, tended to be kind of gross (one
cover has her lasciviously bathing in a fountain of blood) and over the top. I
assumed she was a "standard" vampire, who just happened to be
scantily clad and sexy, rather than an altruistic, non-undead superhero devoted
to ridding Earth of evil monsters, who came from a planet where blood was akin
to water (this version of her origin was later retconned, but the principle's
the same). Interestingly enough, Trina Robbins, who designed Vampirella's
costume, told Comic Book Artist in 1999 that a teacher with whom she
once coffee had grown up enjoying the original magazine but had been "horrified
and repulsed" by what she had seen in recent publications.

What
I perceived as Harris' mishandling of the character kept me away for a long
time, but I became curious when Dynamite released a paperback compilation of
her original stories in 2013 (over 500 pages, culled from the first 37 issues,
for a very-reasonable $25). Being a fan of Bronze-Age horror magazines, I felt
that I needed to at least give the gal a chance. And, man, am I glad I did! I
discovered a treasure-trove of fantastic material and became a fan immediately.
I picked up the new series by Nancy Collins and Patrick Berkenkotter that
started a few months later and found it to be likewise excellent, though in
entirely different ways.

Since
then, Vampirella has become one of my favorite characters, and I have collected
most of the magazines (either in their original form or in reprint compilations
such as the excellent Vampirella Archives) and all of the comics
Dynamite has released.

For
those of you who don't know, Vampirella was originally conceived as nothing
more than a horror hostess. During the early 1950s, EC Comics found success
with Tales from the Crypt, The Vault of Horror, and The Haunt
of Fear, hosted, respectively, by the Crypt-Keeper, the Vault-Keeper, and
the Old Witch. When Warren started its line of horror magazines, it borrowed
this idea, giving readers Uncle Creepy, Cousin Eerie, and Vampirella (if you
find it unfair that the women are outnumbered, you might want to check out DC's
oft-overlooked Bronze-Age gem The Witching Hour, in which all of the
stories are hosted by females). After a handful of issues, the editor decided
that Vampirella was falling short of her potential by merely bookending stories
and deserved a feature of her own.

Warren's
magazines were anthologies, featuring several stories by several creative teams
per issue. By the time Vampirella established itself, every issue
included a tale starring the vampiress along with several others, some of which
were parts of series but most of which were standalone stories. The themes in
Vampirella's stories varied. Sometimes she'd fight monsters. Other times she'd
face evil wizards or alien invaders. Her adventures were an interesting mixture
of horror, fantasy, and science fiction, which reflected the genres that Warren's
magazines made extensive use of (while it's usually associated with horror,
many stories were sword & sorcery, science fiction, or weird western). The
artwork was consistently spectacular, executed by such greats as Jose "Pepe"
Gonzalez, Gonzalo Mayo, Esteban Maroto, Jose Ortiz, Alfredo Alcala, Luis
Bermejo, and Rafael Aura Leon (Auraleon).

I
selected #38 (November 1974) to discuss both because it's the earliest full
issue in my collection and because it contains a mummy story, which is of
particular interest to me. The issue comprises six tales, and, like most of
Warren's magazines of the period, it's a great-looking package. The cover, by
Manuel Sanjulian, is a real beaut; it possesses many of the attributes that
made classic horror so compelling, juxtaposed with Vampi's stunning figure. (I
was born too late to enjoy Warren's mags during their original run, and I envy
readers who were able to get this much awesomeness for a mere dollar at the
local newsstand month after month. Granted, a dollar was a lot more money back
then, but comics are four bucks these days, and they arguably aren't as good.)
There was a major Universal Monsters revival going on at the time, coupled with
the fact that the Comics Code Authority had finally relaxed its standards,
leading to a resurgence in monster comics (it should be noted that magazines
were not forced to adhere to the Code, which is how Warren and its ilk were
able to flourish). It's hard to deny that, for a horror magazine, Vampirella had a touch of class.

Vampirella
starts things off with "The Mummy's Revenge," by Flaxman Loew and
Gonzalez. Vampirella's most prolific illustrator, Gonzalez uses many different
techniques in his storytelling. Here, he juxtaposes light and dark (not unlike
the Renaissance artist Caravaggio) to create a feeling of endless dread within
eerie catacombs. You can almost smell the dust and decay as the undead emerge
from their niches. (Am I the only one who likes the smell of old comics?)

Touring
Italy's Museum of Antiquities, Vampirella encounters a young antiquarian named
Bruno Verdi. She accepts his invitation to dinner, and after the meal he takes
her on a tour of the catacombs beneath the city, where untold thousands of
souls were lain to rest. The vampiress soon realizes, however, that Verdi has
left her to be torn apart by the undead, including the mummy of Ptolemy, who,
strangely enough, is a vampire. With the help of Amun-Ra, Vampirella escapes
and heads to Verdi's apartment, where she gets her revenge by feeding on his
blood. He and the mummy, which is still back in the tomb, simultaneously
crumble to dust, and Vampirella, when questioned about her evening, humorously
remarks that her date "went all to pieces." (This may seem corny, but
horror and humor have gone hand in hand for decades. The EC stories almost
always ended with the host's dropping a pun or two, a tradition which has been
picked up by the new quarterly Warren pastiche The Creeps, which I will no doubt write about eventually.)

Mummies
have been popular fixtures in horror fiction since the 1800s. The discovery of
the strangely intact tomb of Tutankhamen by Howard Carter in 1922 brought
immense public attention to the discipline of Egyptology, and the mystique of
perfectly-preserved corpses from millennia ago compelled even more writers to
pen horrific tales of the risen dead. (H. P. Lovecraft even ghost-wrote a story
for Harry Houdini called "Imprisoned with the Pharaohs," which is
definitely worth checking out.) The new medium of film made the prospect of
such tales even more promising. Universal and Hammer each produced their own
versions of the mummy story, and there have been numerous others since then.
Marvel published The Living Mummy in the pages of Supernatural Thrillers in the early 1970s, and all of the horror
magazines featured bandaged abominations at one time or another. For
Vampirella, mummies are just another kind of monster, nothing to write home
about, although the revelation that she was, in fact, Cleopatra in a previous
life adds more weight to the story. Exactly how she was supposed to have been
born on alien planet and also undergone reincarnations on Earth is a question
better left unasked.

Five
more excellent tales follow.

Gerry
Boudreau, Carl Wessler, and Maroto give us "Gypsy Curse," in which a
rich count marries a gypsy maiden but succumbs to a terrible curse when he
chooses to mistreat her. Maroto is another of Warren's most skilled artists.
His airy ink work, combined with his phantasmagoric layouts, imbues his stories
with an almost dreamlike aspect. It is interesting that the "gypsy"
is a stock character in fiction (as a fortune teller and/or dabbler in magic of
questionable ethics), but to the Romani, to whom the term refers, it is often
considered a slur. Because of this, it is used far less frequently these days,
but it's hard to deny the appeal of the image of an old, cloaked woman residing
in a tenebrous wagon parked in the forest, ominously prognosticating with her
tarot deck.

"Lucky
Stiff," by Boudreau, Wessler, and Ramon Torrents, is the curious story of
a mild-mannered office worker who becomes bewitched by the gorgeous new file
clerk. Readers are given a glimpse into the possible, horrific outcome of their
rendezvous, but he never reaches her house because fate has other plans. The
archetype of the "crazy cat lady," which has become so popular these
days, is flipped on its head in this yarn, and we are given just a hint of the
twisted world of the girl in the office who seizes the attention of every man
who crosses her path. Not unlike the hapless sailors enchanted by the sirens'
song, they are bound to be undone by their own appetites.

Next,
John Jacobson and Felix Mas offer up "Out of the Nameless City." Fans
of H. P. Lovecraft will immediately recognize his fingerprints in this tale,
and there are several things taken directly from his work. Set in 1926, the
year Lovecraft's groundbreaking "The Call of Cthulhu" was written,
this story concerns an actor believed to be the key to the resurrection of
ancient gods and the man who tries to stop it from happening. This story's
execution, viewed both as a pastiche and a story unto itself, is practically
flawless.

"On
Little Cat Feet," by Jacobson and Auraleon, is a tale of bizarre
witchcraft. When an elderly landlady kicks a witch out of her boarding house,
the sorceress, having transformed herself into a cat, returns to seek revenge.
But she finds that her former roommate, a sculptor, has a bizarre way of
creating her statues. There is quite a bit of humor in this story, but there
are also moments that are bound to make readers chuckle in "self-defense"
because it's hard to know what to make of them. Warren's magazines often
feature particularly weird stories, and this is definitely one. It makes you
wonder how on earth the writer came up with it.

The issue concludes with "Trick of the Tide," Jack Butterworth
and Isidro Mones' short-but-sweet yarn of a treacherous man named Gabriel
Greaves who earns money fishing corpses out of the Thames and the waterlogged
corpse of a woman he murders for her husband's money. Not surprisingly, things
do not turn out terribly well for him. Let's just say that he learns the hard
way that being an opportunist can have dire consequences.

Monday, March 6, 2017

Alternatives to Traditional Roleplaying

By Matthew Stephen Sunrich

Dungeons & Dragons
(D&D), the world’s first
roleplaying game (RPG), was introduced in 1974. The original version of the
game was, in essence, an expansion for Gary Gygax’s tabletop miniatures game Chainmail and, thus, did not have its
own unique combat system. You had to have a copy of the miniatures game in
order to play it. It was also, for some, difficult to understand. While these
and other issues led some players to the conclusion that the rules needed
clarifications and/or further development, there was no doubt that the
fledgling company Tactical Studies Rules (TSR) had a hit on its hands.

Within a short time, similar games were coming out of the
woodwork. It seemed as though the gaming community had been waiting for the
fantasy RPG to be created and just didn’t know it. The first of these was Flying
Buffalo’s Tunnels & Trolls (T&T), which debuted about a year
after D&D. While its predecessor
was a fairly serious game, T&T
was designed in a more lighthearted vein. It was also less complex and was the
first game system to offer single-player options. One of the biggest challenges intrinsic to RPGs is getting a
group together (and, having done so, preventing that group from imploding). By
design, RPGs require at least two players, preferably more. Someone has to run
the game in which the players take part (a Game Master (GM) in general terms or
a Dungeon Master (DM) in D&D). But
what do you do when you crave a fantasy adventure but don’t have anyone to play
with?

To solve this
problem, T&T introduced solo
adventures. These took the form of short books in which players make choices at
certain points and turn to the corresponding section. For example, the text
might say something like, “You enter a dimly-lit room. There are doors to the
north and west. A small chest stands in one corner. To go north, turn to 25. To
go west, turn to 78. To open the chest, turn to 44.” If this sounds familiar,
it was later used by the creators of the Choose
Your Own Adventure book series, although the T&T books differed in that players use a character sheet and
roll dice to determine outcomes, just like in a traditional session. Basically,
the book was the GM.

Games Workshop
(the British company known these days for the miniatures game Warhammer) founders Steve Jackson and
Ian Livingstone introduced Fighting
Fantasy in 1982. Unlike the T&T
solo adventures, these books were self-contained; they did not require players
to use the rules of the “parent” game, as there wasn’t one. With titles such as
The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, Deathtrap Dungeon, Temple of Terror, and House
of Hell, this high-quality series proved very popular and remained in
publication until 1995, totaling 59 books.

Thursday, February 9, 2017

A Plea for Policy Change to Amazon's Jeff Bezos

Dear readers,

Please excuse my indulgence in this post, but I sent the following letter today to Amazon's founder, chairman, and CEO, Jeff Bezos, and wanted to also post it here since it discusses an absurd and counterproductive Amazon policy that affects every single writer who uses Amazon Author Pages to promote their work, and because it partly involves Hasslein Books' titles. I tend to doubt my letter will change anything, but I firmly believe that it's always worth trying. If you're an author, I recommend you let Amazon know how you feel about their policy as well.

—Rich Handley

========================================

Dear Mr. Bezos,

I write to you today to express concern about
a pair of emails I received regarding my Amazon Author Page.
Recently, I've been adding books to my page for which I've contributed substantial
amounts of writing, in an effort to make it easier for readers to find my work.
Today, I added Planet of the Apes Archive Vol. 1: Terror on the Planet of the Apes to my page, for which I penned both the foreword and the afterword. After doing
so, I received an email informing me that although the book would be added, Amazon
has a policy of not listing books on Author Pages for those who have written foreword, introductions or afterwords, and that herein, no further such books
would be listed on my page.

I politely protested this policy, but
received another email repeating the rule. With all due respect, your company's
reasoning on this matter is flawed. Here's why:

For every book on my Amazon Author Page for
which I'm listed as an editor, I'm also one of the writers. I don't list any
books on my page for which I am only the editor and not one of the authors, such
as those put out by my independent publishing company, Hasslein Books. For
example, I'm the editor of Total Immersion: The Comprehensive Unauthorized Red Dwarf Encyclopedia,
but not the author. Hence, although I have an editor credit on the book's
landing page, it's not included on my Amazon Author Page since I don't take
credit for others' work. On the other hand, I'm both an editor and an author of
The Sacred Scrolls: Comics on the Planetof the Apes.
Hence, it's listed on my Amazon Author Page, as it should be.

So far, your staff have been quite helpful
and friendly, and have added all of the books I've asked them to add. But given
today's emails, that's apparently no longer going to be the case. That's a
problem for me, as there are several unannounced books for which I've been both
an editor and an author as well, but which I won't be able to include on my Author
Page now, once the publishers announce them. This is going to majorly dampen my
enthusiasm when those volumes come out. In fact, it applies to a majority of
the books to which I've contributed.For Planet of the Apes: Tales from the Forbidden Zone, for example, my co-editor and I
conceived of the project, brought it to Titan Books and 20th Century
Fox, hired all of the authors, and then each wrote more than 40 pages (a short
story and an introduction). I'm one of the book's seventeen authors. But
because I'm listed on Amazon as the editor and my co-editor is listed as an
author due to how the publisher set up the landing page, your policy would
dictate that I wouldn't be allowed to have it on my Author Page, yet he would.
How is that a working system? How does that make sense?

The same problem applies to all of my Planet
of the Apes and Star Wars books
from Sequart—I co-edited each of them, but I am also one of the authors for every
volume. Each of these books is a team collaboration, and I wrote lengthy essays
that ran with my byline alongside the work of the other essayists. We're all
equal contributors. But if Sequart decides to list me as the editor while
setting up the book's listing on Amazon, suddenly I'm not allowed to have any
of them on my Amazon Author Page? Again, that makes no sense to me.

As for forewords, introductions and
afterwords to other books, those involve a good deal of writing and research on
my part. In fact, for the books from IDW and BOOM! Studios for which I've
written a foreword, an introduction and/or an afterword, I'm the only person who
wrote anything new for those books—they're all reprints of classic comic strips
(Star Trek, Star Wars and Planet of the
Apes), and I was invited to compose all supplementary text created for each
book, in essence having me present the strips to the fans. And in the case of
IDW's five Star Trek hardcovers on my
Author Page, they're actually reprinting my personal comics collection, and I'm
the one who conceived of the project in the first place. So how sensible is
your policy if I'll no longer be able to list such books on my page?

The thing is, I'm not trying to be
argumentative, arrogant, difficult or rude—honestly, I'm not. Your staff are
all just doing their jobs, and I appreciate how helpful and expedient each has
been every time I've asked to have a book added. They're not the enemy and
neither are you, and I mean no disrespect to anyone involved whatsoever. But
the bottom line is this: Amazon's policy is just too rigid. It screws over
authors like me, whose contributions aren't so clear-cut and black-and-white. For
the Titan and Sequart books, for example, my name is on the front cover of each
volume, and I'm one of each book's authors, yet I wouldn't be able to have any
of them on my Author Page, simply due to an arbitrary "no editors"
rule. It's a policy that is dismissive of what editors do, and it's as unrealistic
as it is admittedly offensive. I urge you to reconsider.

I use my Amazon Author Page to promote my
work, in the hope that others will buy it after finding it all listed together.
If I can't list half my books from now on due to some ill-conceived policy
about what constitutes an author, then of what use to me—or to any writer, for
that matter—is the Author Page? If a writer has helped to spearhead a project
from start to finish and has contributed many pages to a book, as I have with
my books from Titan and Sequart, how is that writer not an author? If a writer pens
supplementary materials for a book, such as an afterword, an introduction, a
foreword, a lexicon, or whatever else, as I have with the books from IDW and
BOOM! Studios, how is that writer not an author?

More importantly, why would Amazon want to
reduce its revenue opportunities? From a promotions and marketing standpoint, that
seems nonsensical. What could you possibly gain from making it so that I can't
promote all of my books at Amazon from a single landing page? Wouldn't you want
fans of my work to be able to easily find and buy all of it? How could you
possibly be better off as a seller of books if half of the titles containing my
writing aren't listed when people look me up? Honestly, I'm baffled by this.
Please help me understand.

Better yet, please consider making your
policy much simpler and author-friendly. I respectfully recommend that if an
author wishes to list a book to which he or she has contributed as a writer on
his or her Amazon Author Page, then let him or her do so, provided that there's
proof of that individual's involvement. How would such a policy in any way
constitute a problem for Amazon? It would mean more potential book sales. You'd
win, I'd win, your customers would win—everyone would win. The current policy,
on the other hand, hurts all of us.In short, I see no downside to letting authors
include foreword, introduction and afterword contributions on our Author Pages.
Where's the business logic in limiting my ability to promote my books that you
sell? Thank you for your time and consideration. I look forward to hearing from
you at your convenience.

Friday, February 3, 2017

The Awakening

By Matthew Stephen Sunrich

In 1899, Kate
Chopin published a short novel called The
Awakening. Considered controversial at the time for its feminist themes and
the candid way in which it deals with female sexuality, it has gone on to
become a major headache for unsuspecting high-school and college literature
students everywhere.

Thankfully, this
essay has nothing to do with it.

The "awakening"
I'm referring to was—for lack of a better term—an event that took place
during my freshman year of high school, though it was not related to school
itself. In June of 1988, I celebrated my fourteenth birthday. One of the gifts
I received was a Nintendo game called The
Legend of Zelda. Since then, it has spawned numerous sequels across
numerous systems, has been featured in cartoons and comic books, and has
appeared on T-shirts, tote bags, and even cereal boxes, but at the time it was
a brand-new thing.

I had gotten a
Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) the previous Christmas, and, having grown
weary of Super Mario Bros., the game that
came with it and of which I had at one time been a rabid fan, and Elevator Action, the second title I had
picked up, I was eager to get into something else. I had no idea what Zelda was all about. At that time, the
Internet as we know it today didn't exist, of course, so you could only get
information about NES games from Nintendo
Fun Club News (the precursor to Nintendo
Power), to which I did not have a subscription, or from word of mouth. I
didn't know anyone who had played the game, but I had seen a lot of commercials
for it, so I decided to give it a shot. After all, Nintendo had cultivated a
reputation for quality, so the odds of its being a letdown were slim.

I imagine that
for many players Zelda was a
revolutionary game, as it was for me. Up to that point, most console games
lacked an adventure component. The aforementioned Super Mario Bros., for example, only allowed you to go in a
predetermined direction, and backtracking was not permitted. If you missed
something, you had no choice but to suck it up and keep going. Zelda was different. Its world was open
and, for the time, vast. You could revisit areas again and again. In fact, one
of the chief elements of the game was exploration. You were not told what to do
or how to do it. You had to figure everything out through trial and error, to
traverse deadly forests and spooky graveyards to find the entrances to the game's
various levels. You had to determine how weapons and items worked and when they
should be used. A map and instruction manual were included, but they only told
you so much. Every now and then a wise old man in a cave would give you a clue,
but it was often cryptic. For the most part, you were on your own.

Computer-game
players were already familiar with this kind of thing. Games like Ultima, Wizardry, and Bard's Tale
worked this way. The difference was that while these games required exploration
and puzzle solving, they lacked action. The outcomes of battles were resolved
by the computer, in a fashion similar to tabletop roleplaying games (RPGs). In
a sense, the computer rolled the dice for you during an encounter and told you
the outcome. In many of these games, the player controlled an entire party of
characters rather than just one. The reason for this is that tabletop games
like Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) are designed to be played
by a group rather than an individual, with each player having a specific
function within the party (a fighter for combat, a wizard for magic, a cleric
for healing, et cetera).

Zelda, by contrast,was an action game through and through. It required fast reflexes
and could be terribly frustrating at times, particularly if you wandered into
an area filled with monsters you were not prepared to fight. Like computer
adventure games, it had an overhead view rather than a side-scrolling one. Its
closest antecedent was the Atari 2600's Adventure,
but while this game required exploration and experimentation and featured
rudimentary action sequences (mostly running from dragons or trying to stab
them), it was much smaller in scope, did not allow you to carry more than one
item at a time, and had primitive graphics due to the system's limitations. No
one had seen anything like Zelda before.

As I recall, it
took me about a month to conquer it. For those four weeks, it was pretty much
all I thought about. I even took the map with me when we went on vacation. It
was the most immersive game I had ever encountered. But the experience of
playing the game, while rewarding, was not the most important thing. I got
something much greater out of it. It was my introduction to fantasy.

As an avid
collector of Masters of the Universe (MoTU) action figures and a
devoted fan of the tie-in cartoon during my younger years, I had been exposed
to the concept of fantasy, but I had never really thought of it as a genre. I
didn't even know what "genre" meant. I just found it cool that the
warriors fought with swords and axes and that there were magic and monsters
involved. D&D had become huge by the early 1980s, and many toy lines
reflected its influence. I was a fan of many of the MoTU knockoffs, as
well, including Thundercats, Blackstar, and The Other World,
the first two of which also had their own cartoons. There was even a toy line
actually based on Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, which was the
preeminent version of the game at the time.

The most
memorable figure was probably Warduke, who was later made into a miniature as
part of the D&D Miniatures set "War Drums." Of course,
there was also the D&D cartoon (the "Advanced" was likely
removed to prevent confusion, although that didn't stop DC Comics from using it
in the title of its early-'90s comic book series), which was fairly
controversial due to the absurd allegations that the game was linked to
suicide, antisocial behavior, and devil worship. I can remember watching it
standing up so I could keep an eye on the door of my parents' bedroom. Not even
kidding.

By the time Zelda
came along I hadn't given fantasy much thought in several years, having become
instead interested in Garbage Pail Kids, Madballs, and horror
films like Friday the 13th and ANightmare on Elm
Street. Soon after I began playing it, I became intrigued by Zelda's
fantasy setting, and when I had finished the game I began looking for others in
a similar vein. When school started, I met a guy named John (with whom I remain
friends to this day), who was a computer- and console-game enthusiast, an RPG
player, and a fan of speculative fiction. He was the first full-on nerd I had
ever met, and I mean that as an enormous compliment. He introduced me to D&D,
Commodore 64 adventure games (with their cloth maps and copy-protection
wheels), and Dragonlance novels. (I subsequently turned him onto Forgotten
Realms novels, thus returning the favor.) It didn't take long to realize
that I was onto something big.

At the start of
1989, I began collecting comic books. I had grown up enjoying Superfriends,
Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends, and The Incredible Hulk on
Saturday mornings, but I was a reluctant reader, so I had never bought many comics.
Even though most comic books are not fantasy in the strictest sense, they
feature speculative tales of a similar nature and borrow elements from fantasy,
so there are, therefore, a lot of crossover fans. There's a reason that many
comic-book shops also carry RPG books and accessories.

The "awakening"
was, hence, my discovery of fantasy fandom. In the span of just a few months, I
had found my niche, and I have remained there ever since. Today, I have a
comic-book and magazine collection that would have made fourteen-year-old me
lose control of his bodily functions. I have well over 700 miniatures, a
plethora of dice (especially d20s, my favorites), and a number of publications
related to fantasy games going back to the 1970s, which are just engaging to
read. I have used my writing ability as a means of sharing my passion,
contributing to the hobby, and "giving back" to the community. I have
found incalculable joy in the books and games I have picked up during the last
28 years.

I cannot imagine
what my life would have been like if I had never slid The Legend of Zelda
into my Nintendo Entertainment System in the summer of 1988. Traversing the
environs of the fictional world of Hyrule helped me discover myself.